Clinton destroys Trump

She was prepared and coherent. He wasn’t. The turning point of the debate was his incoherent answer to the birther question. He seemed to lose energy and become increasingly dysfunctional after that, just repeating alt-right talking points and, toward the end, reduced to echoing whatever the last complicated word Secretary Clinton had just used. Thoughts?

At the beginning on trade, he was pretty good. I mean, his answers were dumb and he was a dick, but he hit the right themes and he didn’t look so bad. Going into the second half of the debate was pure disaster. His arguments with Lester Holt were outrageous. He is a disgusting, vile little man and he showed that to everyone for much of the night.

At the beginning, Trump made a deal of calling his opponent “Madame Secretary”. He kept that up for 45-50 minutes. Then he got tired, and it became Hillary.

A small detail, but it told me that Trump can’t stay on point for longer than an elementary school math lesson. How he could survive a three-hour meeting with Putin (or someone he doesn’t actually admire), I can’t imagine.

Online users of MassLive probably skew heavily liberal in their confirmation bias. As do most of our friends on Facebook and most of the local media commentariat.

Put yourself in the frame of mind of an Ohio blue collar worker laid off due to a factory relocation. Is he or she more or less likely to be tempted to throw the dice on Trump after tonight? Is he or she more or less likely to hold his or her nose for Hillary? What about a Florida low education service worker? What about a Colorado or Nevada suburbanite professional who hates Trump but is tempted to vote for Gary Johnson? Has she convinced them to vote for her and not just against Trump?

I don’t see the slam dunk others are seeing. He had a good opening round on trade and NAFTA that caught her off guard and put her on the defensive, they then broke even on personal scores. I will say he missed an opportunity to go after her on the emails and her apology came across as sincere and presidential. And she won the tax returns round and his business sense round. But I think he was able to tie her to mistakes Obama made on ISIS and the Iran deal (which is the right thing to do but overwhelmingly unpopular), and she was forced to spend too much time defining and defending what she did do on foreign policy rather than talking about what she will do. She referred to her website too much about plans and missed an opportunity to define them in simple terms for the broadest audience possible.

She won the split decision, but failing to knock him out lets him walk away with a decent number of swing voters still undecided. Maybe they aren’t leaning his way anymore, the new polls will have to show us if it worked, but she failed to go for the jugular and the rope a dope strategy waiting for him to implode didn’t happen. We are used to his uneven temperament by now and it wasn’t worse than anything he did in the primary, and at many moments came off as more constrained.

Perhaps I am overly sensitive to my own confirmation bias, but I was surprised he surpassed my low expectations and she didn’t really meet mine for her.

Do they tell you to call Trump leaners dumb when you canvass in NH or tell you to be friendly and empathisizing? I suspect the latter so you can persuade them to vote for her. There are hundreds of thousands of voters out there who haven’t been persuaded to vote for either candidate and we have to put ourselves in their shoes to be effective.

I want Clinton to win, I think she will win, albeit narrower than it needed to be without any coattails, and I think she will be a great President. I’m on record defending her against my own side during the primary and consistently saying she out debated Sanders. I praised her convention speech as the best moment in her public life.

Last night she spoke directly to me, the coastal liberal living in a multicultural family. Will I be the deciding vote this election? Doubtful. We need to know what the voters who dislike both candidates think about what they need to become Hillary voters, and if this debate helped or hurt that effort.

Canvassing is not my wheelhouse though I certainly know what goes into it, and yes messages on the doorstep for any candidate generally trend positive. I’m not sure what “homerism” means, but I get very frustrated that it seems that everything she has done or the rest of us suggests is never good enough for you. It comes across as concern trolling.

and I think she won. Why? She looked and sounded more presidential than he did. Punch it up, and I think she won. Why? She was more prepared, gave coherent answers, and took the fight to him in a smooth way. His snorting, interruptions, facial expressions going after Lester Holt (the Democrat who is really a Republican), all came across as boorish, and un-presidential.

The more interesting question to me is what does it mean if she “won” the debate. Probably not much, unfortunately. She may get a little bit of a bump but not much is my guess. Even more importantly does the little bump happen where she needs it? Wisconsin (which is in play but shouldn’t be), Nevada (ditto), Iowa (ditto), and FL and OH (either of which will put her over the top). My guess is that among undecided voters in those places, neither one of them did much to win them over last night. She has structural advantages in the EC—but she has to capitalize on it with ground game, and better messaging.

Not for nothing, but Trump was on Fox this morning calling the beauty contestant fat, again. If anyone else in American politics did this the race would be over. It’s just incredible that it doesn’t matter when trump does it.

By “win” I mean move the needle with undecided voters. Perhaps that’s a different definition than our editors. She clearly out argued and it debated him and did so from a more commanding position than any of his GOP rivals.

But I largely think the status quo will remain unchanged, it’ll be a narrow win for her and she will have to work hard to earn every vote that turns out. One thing I do hope to see is third party support erode, there’s really no excuse to vote that way this year. Not with the danger Trump poses and the nuttiness of Stein and Johnson.

the next two debates in the same way, maybe that will be worth something. At least I can hope… It will be interesting to see what he does to try to improve on his performance—will he come out guns blazing, and attack her with a bunch of shit about Monica, Flowers, Jones? Or, will he try a different tact, to try to look/act/sound more presidential? I don’t think that he has the intellectual horsepower (public policy wise, in a debate setting) to improve as much as President Obama did in ’12 between debates 1 and 2.

What came across on the screen was Trump’s incapability. He’s above his head and acting like a buffoon. If you’re Factory Worker X in Ohio and that guy is running your company, you recognize it’s time to get a new job because that fool is going to run the company into the ground. If you’re Suburban Housewife Z, you saw the type of alpha jerk you hate and to whom you don’t want your daughters subjected. If you’re Millennial Q who’s been sitting on the fence, you saw a command performance by the guy capable of ruining your future.

Meanwhile Clinton, even for those who don’t like her, came across as intelligent and mature. She rose above the clown show to her immediate right. She presented a vision of how the government should operate and listed actual programs and policies to fit in with that vision. She was fluent on foreign policy matters. No real arguing that she’s ready to do the job, even if you’re not enthusiastic about the job you assume she’ll do.

Obviously we don’t know what the polls will do, but my suspicion is younger voters will come off the sidelines after this debate and that will cut heavily in the large undecided/protest vote bloc. Last night gave them all the reason they need to care about this election.

Trump has been exposed as a racist, fraud, misognyist for nearly 15 months and it hasn’t stopped him from winning the GOP nomination or being within a point or two of Clinton right now according to 538.

The really salient attacks are on his lack of preparation for handling basic national security duties and his lack of empathy for the less fortunate. I think they ended up coming out even on this, she had good moments like baiting the ‘i don’t pay for bad work’ remark and the contrast between his dad and hers. But the Iran answer was bad, he tripped her into lengthly, wonky, defensive explanations of her past missteps rather than her using this as an opportunity to blow apart his fitness for office.

I thought her Iran answer was great. As I recall she said they were perilously close to getting a weapon, so we squeezed the sanctions even tighter to force them to the table. We came out with an agreement that keeps the rest of us safe while bringing Iran back into the family of nations.

From the March Times piece on Carrier, which to me explains everything you need to know about this election.

Jennifer Shanklin-Hawkins is one of those Carrier workers who listened to the announcement on the factory floor. After 14 years on the assembly line, she earns $21.22 an hour, enough to put her oldest son through college while raising two other children with her husband, a truck driver.

And when she saw Mr. Trump talking about Carrier on the news, all she could do was shout “Yessss!” at the TV. “I loved it,” she said. “I was so happy Trump noticed us.”

Consider the case of Ms. Shanklin-Hawkins. While she says she won’t be voting for Mr. Trump and considers him a racist, she applauds his message on trade. She says she plans to vote for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who similarly blasts free trade, but from the left. The two populist candidates may be political opposites, but when it comes to the downside of globalization, Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump are speaking to her with one voice.

In fact, many Carrier workers here say that it was not so much Mr. Trump’s nativist talk on illegal immigrants or his anti-Muslim statements that has fired them up. Instead, it was hearing a leading presidential candidate acknowledging just how much economic ground they’ve lost — and promising to do something about it.

Is she necessarily voting for Hillary after tonight? I heard Hillary defend NAFTA and use laweryese to parse each trade agreement on a case by case basis. I heard Donald Trump say the American people got snowed and those deals end under his watch.

I later heard her very poignantly bring up her dad and Donald’s dad, and even argued her dad could’ve been a victim of his and his dad’s schemes. She hit him pretty hard on the tax returns and why he is withholding them, and she came across sounding tough on banks and America’s enemies. I didn’t see the slam dunk others are seeing.

Parsing the details of policy is exactly what a President should be doing, the rest is just bluster. She didn’t mention Carrier tonight, but the first I heard about their situation was when SHE used it as an example during the primaries of a company she would like to impose an exit tax on for getting public subsidy and then still moving jobs out of the country. Trump just blustered and promised America could be “great again” without offering many workable specifics.

And I think she delivered that in the middle where she really hit him hard on being a bad businessman and an unethical one, and not releasing his tax returns. She also spoke eloquently about her parents struggles compared to the silver spoon he was born with (and most third party investment analysts argue he squandered through poor investments).

…to the politics as popularity contest model? Surely you know better than that! You remind me of CJ Cregg on The West Wing where she says, “Everyone is stupid in an election year.” I’d rather be Charlie Young who responds, “No, everyone is TREATED as stupid in an election year.” Granted the basket of deplorables side of Trump’s support may be a lost cause, but lets assume others, especially those undecided, may actually want to hear what the candidates will do for them.

Which means empathy and laying out broad ways of how they will fight for you, no low info voter wants a ten point plan on how to fix each issue affecting America. You seem to forget that many voters have tuned out this election until last night. It got far better ratings than the convention, any of the primary debates, or any interview or news specials with the candidates. This was her chance to make a new impression and she succeeded in some areas and was lacking in others. I’m sure she will go over the tape like any good athlete and correct her weaknesses.

Trump was definitely out of stamina at the end, so it’s my expectation Hillary gets the better of him in the next two contests. But this wasn’t the slam dunk or knock out partisans are making it out to be, but a win by decision and one that will require additional rounds to crown a champion. I have every expectation that will be Clinton. But she didn’t knock him out last night. Trump is Joe Frazier, not Sonny Liston.

She has spent the entire campaign going back to the primary telling us how she is “fighting for you”. You’re asking her to pretend she has strengths she just doesn’t. We haven’t heard I feel your pain a la Bill and it might sound forced if she tried. I hear she’s a lot better in small group settings, but cannot vouch for that personally. Just now there was an ad on TV demonstrating how far back her fighting for children specifically has gone in her career. I have no doubt she has plenty of empathy. Her entire career demonstrates that and last time I checked actions spoke louder than words.

That’s our only fundamental disagreement. I do not doubt her commitment or capabilities, it’s a lot of our fellow Americans than do. And simply whining like you do that they should pay attention, it’s actually the candidates job to make them pay attention and bring their narrative and story to them. It’s how Obama went from 3% name recognition to being a two term President and winning over white states like Iowa. By connecting his unique and crazy story to the average Americans.

And I will actually disagree with your low expectations for her. She can show she feels peoples pain. Her best debate moments were when she discussed her hard scrapple upbringing in contrast to the glitz and glamour of the orangeman beside her.

Forcing Trump to admit 14 million was ‘a small loan’ and that he likes firing and fleecing people like her dad, like all of ours. It was the moment when she wasn’t a 30 year political insider but an outsider who played the insiders game to help people like us.

Did you see the Frontline documentary ‘The Choice’? There are classmates of hers going back to Park Ridge and Wellesley who talk about her breaking down in tears when MLK got shot, who talk about her work in Washington, how hard she took failing the bar, and how unfair people in Arkansas were to her for being a strong woman. Not to mention how Trump like her dad was in ruling his home and the racism and misogny she had to endure on a day to day basis from him.

I strongly feel those surrogates should be on ads, not just on late night PBS shows, and I feel that story from her bio isn’t well known. Maybe to you, you’ve been following her for a lot longer than I’ve been. To those of us just supporting her for the first time for this campaign, and my fellow millennials who watched Barney instead of the McGlaughlin group like I did when I was five, they need to know. You can’t bring a horse to water. You can’t assume the voters know the real you either.

I think the aphorism your looking for is “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”.

I think Christopher is saying that Ms. Clinton has been bringing the horse (the electorate) to water (her lifelong history of service), but that she cannot make them drink. Just to stay within the metaphor, it doesn’t help that the media is careful to spend ENORMOUS amounts of airtime either saying that the water “might be” poisoned, or sanctimoniously reporting that large numbers of horses believe that the water is poisoned. It is, in fact, very difficult for the purveyor of said water to convincingly assert that the water is safe and pure — the media then report that as self-serving persuasion.

Yes, indeed, the Hillary Clinton campaign must continue to do this. Yes, indeed, this is a crucial part of winning over millennials.

In my view, it is precisely because of this that we all must do a much more effective job of helping millennials understand the ways that they are being manipulated and helping them overcome that manipulation.

The most important part of that is helping millennials understand that “changing the channel” and not voting (or voting for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson) is a self-destructive cop-out.

Hillary Clinton has been bringing the horse to water. She is not able to make them drink.

She literally has to take the water and spoon feed the horse. That’s what winning campaigns do. She needs to be viewed as a friend who will fight for the voter, not a wonk who will deliver them policy briefs.

Two PBS documentaries I watched this week highlight this. The first was a look at the failed Romney and Dukakis campaigns, and how Bush and Obama made them both seem out of touch and weird. Romney had a host of regular people testify at the convention during the day about the positive impact he had on their lives, while in primetime it was Clint and the chair. The Duke robotically answered the unfair Shaw question, and didn’t even convey the deep love he had for his wife. Both were missed opportunities to appear empathetic and normal to undecided voters.

The second documentary, Frontline’s excellent objective look at both 2016 candidates really shows how loyal her friends from childhood still are, how her fight for social and economic justice has been a lifelong obsession, how her youth pastor and early exposure to MLK changed her course. How her racist and misogynist dad belittled her accomplishments and hurt her mother. How she rose above all of that only to fail the DC bar and resign herself to Arkansas where she was never accepted as the strong and intelligent woman she is.

Her life has been an exercise in men close to her humiliating her, a lifelong and fruitless quest for peace in the home and privacy (which likely led to the many mistakes over the years as well), and fighting for children, equal rights at home and abroad (her interventionism stems from a deep commitment to human rights), and working families.

She wept when MLK was killed, her female friends saw how depressed and unhappy she was in Arkansas where she was expected to be nothing more than an accessory, and these personal stories do show she can feel our pain and that this feeling inspires her career. I really think it would make for compelling copy in ads, and really highlights her strengths, far more than simply showing she did her homework while her opponent ate his.

…that this sentence: “She needs to be viewed as a friend who will fight for the voter, not a wonk who will deliver them policy briefs.” represents two mutually exclusive qualities. Ultimately, she can and will be successful fighting for people IFF she understands the policy briefs. That’s the difference between her and the DUMB candidate. Even he can at least pretend the former, but the latter is what makes a President. Again, I have seen evidence of her empathetic side in her bio ads.

Of course, I may be the only person is the country who likes Dukakis’s reply to Shaw on the death penalty. A President needs to calmly and fairly apply his values and the law without getting all emotional just because of the identity of the hypothetical victim. If he were to suggest when it’s his family he’d favor death he would be a hypocrite. If he popped off about wanting to slug Kitty’s assailant himself that would be unpresidential. He gave the most honest an dispassionate answer he could given his views of capital punishment.

The only time I see this candidate in a way that I feel comfortable with is when she thinks the cameras are not rolling, like the time she spoke to the Black Lives Matter people. It all the orchestrated moves, the prepared replies that turn me off. You can understand policy and be able to speak frankly with people, in a friendly tone.

I think that she, and her core supporters, would be helped by a good dose of humility. That stuff sells. She’s sweep this thing.

…though I’m pretty sure we are now 43 for 43 on Presidents of the homo sapiens species:)

Seriously, for all the grief he got I really do think that as Obama said in the ’08 primary, HRC is “likable enough” and I certainly don’t object to prepared replies. The DUMB candidate has certainly gives us more than his share of unprepared ones. Like she said in the debate she has been preparing to BE President. She knows that everything she says is parsed, and will be even more so as President. That is the lesson she has well learned from being in the national spotlight for a quarter century.

I’m glad she’s a wonk. That’s a great side to show other policy makers. Voters want you to feel their pain and know their struggle. Obama, Clinton, and Reagan got this. Carter, HW Bush, and Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry didn’t get this.

She’s done shots with her aides, she has a wry sense of humor, and she’s lived through profound personal pain and double standards. Embrace the pain and use it to connect to voters. It’s easier for me to forgive the bunker mentality understanding how often her father and husband humiliated her and held her back. That Frontline doc has turned me from a begrudging admirer into a full throated partisan. I want others my age who voted for
my primary candidate to feel the same way. It’s up to the candidate to close the sale.

I’m not asking her to disregard policy, but she’s gotta be a real person in public

… a second order version of the feckless media manipulation about ‘the one you want to have a beer with.’ You’ve even put the word ‘but’ in contrast and implying opposition to policy. Why don’t you just skip ahead to the part where you suggest she get a barn jacket and a pickup truck.

It’s an egregiously dumb fucking way to choose the leader of the free world. I’m voting for Hillary Clinton exactly and precisely because she rejects it. That you feel your interpretation of her affect is an incidental flaw –indeed don’t even countenance the notion that it’s a choice — is you, not her, unable to imagine anything outside the prism of white male entitlement and instant-gratification-media-manipulation.

I want others my age who voted for my primary candidate to feel the same way. It’s up to the candidate to close the sale.

How’s about you and the rest of your cohort grow up? Are you going to try that anytime soon?

She can’t ‘close that sale’ because you’re looking to purchase a warm fuzzy and a trophy for participation. She’s selling expertise as expertise. You’ve spent so long buying on the packaging and the advertising you don’t recognize when the actual product is something worth having in and of itself.

Maybe Secretary Clinton can’t ‘relate’ to you and your ‘peers’ because she’s a highly intelligent person who came of age in a world completely alien to your coddled upbringing and has skillfully and dutifully navigated a long career of unique experiences, varied perspectives and singular challenges that you and your cohort can’t even conceive. You would take all that away from her, and call yourself savvy, rather than recognize your own naivete and complicity.

I’m voting for her and working desperately to make my peers do so. There is a lot of information about her life the general public doesn’t know about that she doesn’t draw attention to that she should. That’s all I was saying.

I graduated with five figures of debt and no job prospects, many of my peers had six figures in debt. No one I know with a liberal arts degree is making more than 50k a year six years out of school. I’ve been on unemployment twice before thirty and Medicaid once. My parents with no college education were able to afford to live in Cambridge and raise me there, I never will, even if I get my teachers license and my wife becomes an RN. My hometown is closed to me and post of my peers. So take your coddled and entitlement charge and shove it up your ass. The boomers mortgaged our future on a credit card and call us whiners since we want them to pick up the tab and pass the torch.

Insult the young and call them stupid, great way to win votes. Call all the white working class voters displaced by an economy that isn’t working for them racist, and see if you can win Ohio. Bill is a Rhodes scholar who ate Quarter pounders and went on Arsenio Hall. I praise her for how well she came across on Frontline and simply suggest her can align employ those friends interviewed as surrogates in ads and am suddenly the reason for dumbing down the electorate.

I don’t want it to be dumbed down, but most voters can’t handle advanced policy. They just don’t have the time or education, and it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of our culture and economy. It’s exactly what we have to fix, but it’s still broken. If she can use campaign finance loopholes as a necessary evil to a progressive end, she can dumb down her program so voters can understand. Paul Krugman agrees.

But most voters aren’t seeing that right now. I saw the Frontline doc and went from being a nose holder scared of Trump to being fired up to elect a great President. So did all of my Johnson and Stein leaning friends who watched it. I learned things I hadn’t learned before like her failing the bar, the shitty way the Arkansas public treated her, her seeing MLK speak and crying when he died, and how nearly all of the negative stuff can be attributed to a father and husband that didn’t respect her and forced her to cover up their failings over and over again. It was a great doc, and the segment on Trump had nothing positive to say about the guy. Get her lifelong friends on tv-they aren’t wonky insiders but regular people who know the good character she has.

…and maybe the age gap between us is showing, though I still say I HAVE seen at least some of that in ads THIS year. While I suppose cheating on your wife is by definition disrespectful to her, on another level I think Bill has a ton of respect for her work, abilities, and accomplishments.

Her father often belittled her achievements just because she was a girl. That’s something I hadn’t known before. And we see that pattern repeat itself and harden her throughout her life. I agree with you about Bill, she did stay with him after all, and I’ve never believed that was just for politics or Chelsea.

But he did humiliate her with the Monica thing, not just by having the affair but by lying to her about it and getting her to spread that lie on television. I relish Trump going after her on that, I truly think she would give an authentic answer that would really knock him out of the race.

In any case, her penchant for secrecy started when she hid her troubled home life from her friends. It’s an understandable reaction and instinct that’s led to the mentality she has to say. Understanding that really helped me understand her. Some of these decisions still stink, but I can forgive her since they came from a place of self preservation. All of Trumps failures came from unsatiated lust for money and power.

This is just an aside, but we watch the least amount of over the air television of any cohort. Streaming services, devices like DVRs and roku’s, and getting our new from the Internet instead of television limit the exposure millennials may have to traditional advertising.

I’ve been religiously watching the Red Sox almost every night when I get home and obviously see a lot of the Ayotte/Hassan ads and a few Trump and Hillary ones, but I would just add this is the toughest demographic to reach with ads. And they aren’t choosing between Hillary and Trump, but between voting and not voting or voting for
her and voting for a third party. The micro targeting has to be different for this group.

Internet ads are easy to block. Social media can be initiated, but not easily controlled, by the campaign. Emails are too easy to delete without reading. There’s plenty of information out there, some of it even accurate. I think we need to figure out more generally how to make that generation WANT to access it AND put in the effort to critically discern what is accurate and relevant.

Assuming the numbers are correct, I’m honestly mystified by Clinton’s relative Internet abstinence, particularly because several of the audiences she most needs to reach now, including Millennials and the college-educated, are eminently targetable through digital channels.

Her digital team is experienced and talented, and we can assume they’ve been advocating for a more aggressive digital outreach posture. My suspicion is that these resource-allocation decisions are being made at the top, perhaps by people who may not have entirely internalized the power of online outreach to connect with niche audiences.

This result is really important. I think jconway is being overly negative about Clinton’s performance. I’m with Bob: I thought overall she was excellent. She baited Trump successfully, and she generally took the high road when he was losing his shit. He cannot be prevented from doing what he’s going to do in situations like this, so we have to accept that he will get in his “good lines” about trade or whatever. But she was superb on the birther question, well prepared on stamina and related points, and I thought very effective in showing that she would be a steady, reliable world leader, while he would not be.

I don’t mean to come across saying she lost the debate, I just am not seeing it as the slam dunk others are seeing and we will see how swing state polling either confirms or rejects my initial impressions. I’m closer to JimC’s assessment. This was a win by decision, not a win by knockout. She won more rounds but she did lose the opening rounds to Trump, and has to firm
up her responses on that issue.

and she didn’t. That was a positive for me during the debate. Trump is clueless, I think we all knew that going in. What I was watching for was any movement on positions from the primary and I didn’t hear any. That’s huge in my book and it should be for others. There were many positions that Sanders debated with Clinton in the primary and Clinton told us she supported many of those same positions. Last night she defended them instead of trying to run away from them. High marks all around for Clinton.

She really hammered on that issue and it’s something Trump hasn’t bothered with. It’s a YUGE issue for middle class families across the country. With a night of sleep the performance is seeming better in retrospect, we will have to see if the polling improved.

we’ve been convinced, falsely, that education is the key to narrowing wealth disparity. It was never at the root of widening disparity but it helps to keep people’s attention away from the real causes.

we’ve been convinced, falsely, that education is the key to narrowing wealth disparity.

… to be convinced, falsely, is to be unconvinced in the same way that to be educated, poorly, is to be un-educated.

I think what you’re trying to say is that, having been convinced under false pretexts, we are distracted from the underlying conspiracy Sure, this is an ‘argument,’ the subtlety of which is completely lost upon the uneducated.

It’s a neat trick to have an argument against education that you need an education to unravel.

I think there is a wide chasm between the earnings of those with degrees and the earnings of those without, that said, my own adult life this far is proof of the limits of a liberal arts education and the successes of friends without degrees shows there are many paths to prosperity. They all require a government invested in creating good jobs secured at good wages, and generating more degrees does not lead to that in the aggregate, though is a right for the individuals seeking it.

But that gap is not the one at issue. The American economic machine has produced an huge amount of wealth in the period from 1997-2015, for example but the median household income in that period DROPPED from $57,900 to $56,600. So where did the money go? Did it go to those with a higher education? No, it went to a specific class of Americans whose formal education has nothing to do with their enormous wealth.

College debt is a function of college tuition skyrocketing, in some cases more than tripling. But this began when the government took over the student loan program to protect students from Evil Banks.

Without the supervision of the marketplace, tuition became just another government program with no top end on price for the same product.

And it turns out that they are charging more interest than the Evil Banks and use the extra money to subsidize more Pell Grants. They also make it difficult to refinance and retire that debt at lower rates.

Are the young adults living with this burden unaware that the entity bleeding them is, in fact, the government who could lower the rates tomorrow but chooses not to?

There are many contributors to the continuous increase in college costs. The chart shows only that those costs have increased, it does not demonstrate that boomers have much to do with it.

The sources I’m familiar with attribute the increase to a combination of several factors:

1. Government research funding has flattened or declined
2. Private research funding has disappeared
3. Alumni giving has slowed or stopped
4. Consumer (parent and student) expectations of facilities have increased
5. Research costs are skyrocketing — lab equipment, hardware, software, and so on. Institutions that don’t keep up can’t attract researchers, and without those researchers can’t attract students.

Increased labor costs are certainly a factor. The sources I talk to in academia blame this on constantly increased expectations from consumers (parents and students) — college consumers want faculty with tenure, they want faculty whose degrees are from prestigious universities, they want faculty who are well-known in their field.

The cost sides all are going up, the income sides are all flat or declining. For those colleges and universities without athletic programs, tuition and fees are the only source to offset those costs.

Baby boomers on the faculty are perhaps a part of all this, but they are by no means the only or even a major driver.

There is no truth whatsoever in the earlier assertion that these increases are caused by changes in government policy. That claim is typical GOP dogma with absolutely no relationship to actual fact.

But this began when the government took over the student loan program to protect students from Evil Banks.

There have been various federal government student loan programs over the years. To which do you refer, so that we can see if the evidence corresponds with your claim? In what year did “the government [take] over the student loan program?”

I am asking if there is a doctor willing to weigh in on that – because i know not just many, but most judge’s in the courts where I represent hard luck people would get sent out to pee in a cup if they presented that way and were that inchoherent. Yes, I am serious.

I am asking if there is a doctor willing to weigh in on that – because i know not just many, but most judge’s in the courts where I represent hard luck people would get sent out to pee in a cup if they presented that way and were that inchoherent. Yes, I am serious.

… the far greater likelihood is that Donald Trump has a simple cold and the symptoms you describe are consistent with this… Colds and flu happen all the time when the weather turns toward fall, and especially on the campaign trail where stamina, being what it is, is used to power through illness, not prevent it. Nor did I particularly note much deviation from his usual incoherence.

While it is not out of the realm of possibility that Trump attempted some form of performance enhancement, I tend to doubt it. His older brother was an alcoholic who died as a result of it in the late ’70’s or early ’80’s and, by separate accounts not just his, this seems to have affected a profoundly abstemious nature in him. I think his incoherence is all natural.

I think, however, any admission that he has an illness will be beyond his simplistic ego and even more simplistic understanding of what stamina means and may lead to some kerfuffle in the coming days He is, after all, in “astonishongly excellent” health, and what virus would dare attempt that… ?

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2 years ago

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walkedtovote

Trump was also drinking a lot of water. While I have nothing against staying hydrated it seems like a bit of karma after his ridicule of Rubio.

Perhaps he was simply sick — after chiding Hillary for taking some time off to rest and prepare all of his running around (campaigning?) led not only to poor preparation but to getting the flu or something (walking pneumonia?).

DONALD TRUMP
And I will tell you, you look at the inner cities, and I just left Detroit and I just left Philadelphia and I just you know you’ve see me I been all over the place, you decided to stay home, and that’s OK. But I will tell you I’ve been all over, and I’ve met some of the greatest people I’ll ever meet within these communities. And they are very, very upset with what their politicians have told them and what their politicians have done.

LESTER HOLT
Mr. Trump.

HILLARY CLINTON
I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. And yes I did. And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president, and I think that’s a good thing.

…and I came in apprehensive. I don’t automatically credit the Dem with the win as a partisan; for example I remember Obama’s first debate in 2012 did not feel like a win. I lost count of the number of times Trump said made a claim about previous statements that left me thinking, “Let’s go to the video tape.”

is no so much the actual substance but whether the candidates appear “presidential.” This has long been Trump’s biggest liability, and it’s difficult to see how Trump helped himself much tonight.

I’d agree with jconway above that Trump had a good opening sticking to the script and touching upon some of the key trade-related issues that have helped him with many voters. It’s good for him that those moments occurred early, when perhaps the most people were tuned in. But things quickly deteriorated from there, with his rambling, often nonsensical answers, bad body language, and anger after he felt he was being personally attacked.

In many ways, it was what one might have expected: Clinton solid, with perhaps no knock-out punches but a steady, “presidential” performance. Trump initially hitting his key points but quickly getting sidetracked by personal feuds and random asides. I’d be surprised if it moves the needle all that much (by the time we get legit polls at the end of the week, not scientifically problematic “instant” polls), but I do think this type of debate plays to Clinton’s advantage long-term for those undecided voters still worried about Trump’s lack of temperament. He likely hurt himself on that front tonight.

She played well to her wider base, he played well to his narrower base, and it’s unclear if either moved the needle on undecideds. Was a low info voter just paying attention convinced to vote for her? I’m still unsure. They certainly weren’t convinced to vote for Trump, so he is still at his ceiling. She’s at her floor and has room to go up, I think that work starts tonight, but it’ll take the next two to get there. He also clearly doesn’t have the stamina for this kind of format.

…I couldn’t watch the entire thing but, from what I saw, I think Trump destroyed Trump. Clinton was just along for the ride. No reflection on her as it is probably not even about the Presidency any more for Trump. I got nothing but pity for him.

I do think that Clinton loses some points for treating Donald Trump as though he is a legitimate candidate –and maybe she has no choice in this because that was the media’s job they didn’t do ten months ago– but it’s only prolonging the pain to dismiss the patently obvious.

The Donald won Republican Survivor with 13 debates. His debate skill and style destroyed the Republican field. Maybe he had an off night, maybe he tried something new, or maybe, just maybe, the key difference is that he debated a candidate far more skilled than the GOP drop outs. Maybe, just maybe, it was Hillary Clinton’s skill that made Donald Trump perform poorly. That’s not just my crazy idea — it’s a very popular thread throughout debate articles today. She needled him, she baited him, she untied the knot and sure enough he unraveled.

She needled him, she baited him, she untied the knot and sure enough he unraveled.

.. all of which would have been handily prevented if Trump had been…well, not Trump.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not minimizing Secretary Clintons debate bona fides anymore than I would question Meadowlark Lemon’s basketball props when playing against the Washington Generals. As with the Globetrotters, so with Clinton: it was only ever going to go the one way…

You play a team with terrible free throw shooters, you employ Hack-a-Shaq. Sure, your opponents inability to hit a free throw is key to the success, but so is recognizing it and consistently putting your opponent on the free throw line before he or she is able to get a shot off.

You don’t use the same strategy against a team that isn’t charity stripe deficient, and Secretary Clinton didn’t employ needles to debate Senator Sanders.

…to treat him as legitimate, there would be a lot of criticism – much of it gender-tinged – thrown her way.

… how is that different from what’s been happening throughout much of the campaign?

I say, take the criticism, and use it to make other people ask the question: is he for real? The criticism is expected, and therefore blunted by its mundane nature as well as its imminent expiration date, but the question has simply not been asked: is he for real?

I don’t know. Maybe people are really afraid of the answer to that question…

I don’t think this moved the needle much – perhaps a bit in Clinton’s direction. No one who thinks Trump is unqualified was convinced otherwise, and a few on the fence may now go for Clinton. And she also solidified the female and Hispanic bases a bit.

But those who just don’t trust Clinton didn’t get anything to change that (nor do I doubt anything short of divine intervention will change that). Guys I went to high school with who took decent blue collar jobs and didn’t go to college didn’t get anything from Clinton to dissuade them from the “whole system is broken” mode of thinking.

If image embeds works, this is my favorite meme from the debate. If not, you can see it at this link.

meanings blended in the idea of winning the debate. As Peter Porcupine has said, there is no winner. It’s a distracting term.

The debate will have positive, negative, and/or no effects. Both sides are dug in–people won’t be changing sides. There will be strengthening of support. Clinton leaners will be more strongly for Clinton. I don’t know about weak supporters of Trump becoming stronger supporters; I don’t know enough about his supporters. Truly undecided voters may trend toward Clinton, if they are truly independent and not GOP or Dem leaners.

We’ll know more by the end of the week, but as JConway and some others said early in the campaign season: it will a close election.

Unlike most pundits, I don’t think I’m capable of knowing what most of the rest of humanity responds positively to. I do think it’s important to remember that while last night probably wasn’t the best Donald, it was actually the Donald that people vote for over 16 other clown car members. Meaning, he’s the guy that people liked. There were definitely moments in the debate that even Republican “Very Serious People” probably thought were awful, but I thought might have actually sounded pretty good to anybody who was considering voting for him in the first place.

This totally flew by me while watching, but apparently some folks in Pennsylvania liked it a lot.

An issue that rarely—if ever—gets play during presidential elections might give Hillary Clinton a surprising leg-up in Pennsylvania.

That’s what was indicated by feedback from a swing-voter focus group that Frank Luntz conducted during the debate. Attendees gave Clinton sky-high feedback during the debate when she criticized private prisons, and said afterward that it’s an important issue in their state. And, of course, that means the issue could help Clinton excite her supporters there and pick up some votes.

are Trump fans. One of them thought Trump won because he took control of the debate by cutting her off, etc.

I goofed on the other kid. He wore a shirt that said “Hill-LIAR-y for Prison.” He had ask me if it was against the rules, and civil libertarian that I am, I said no. However, I talked to the vice principal and asked him to mention a dress code violation to the kid. All three of us randomly converged in the hallway, and the VP, with a straight face told him he needed to see him in the office. The kid was a little shocked. He asked why. The VP said, “Dress code violation.” When I started laughing, he got the joke.